Jeremy Piven Quotes

The stage is my love, it's where I started and where I do my best work.

There are so many great directors that I haven't worked with and that I would love to work with.

The biggest compliment to me is that guys really approach me and they have a connection with me, so there must be something I'm doing that is authentic, otherwise they wouldn't connect with me so strongly. It's a real compliment.

I was in a play directed by my father, and I was doing a fight scene, and the choreography went haywire, and I flew backward over a chair and ripped my thumb all the way to my wrist and had to have surgery to sew up all the tendons in there.

I'm not a pretty boy who came to town and burst out of the gate, which is a good thing, because if I was, I probably wouldn't have been good enough then. I probably wouldn't have lasted. So I was very lucky not to be pretty.

I'm one of these people who would rather show you than tell you through the performance.

My goal, everyone's goal is to get better at what we do.

When I was growing up, I was always on stage but I loved other things.

I don't know if there's a lot of patience anymore. I think that could serve a lot of people.

For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do.

Yet the reality is that I'm a stage actor from the Midwest - probably the opposite of a shark agent.

We all deal with issues of time. The first thing you do in the morning is look at the clock to see what time it is.

You can't make people who you want them to be. That was a hard lesson for me.

If someone mistakes your kindness for weakness, that's their fault - not yours. And it's OK to be a decent human being in this life.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I had never really been around cards.

All I've done is work ... I arrived in Los Angeles in my early 20s and I've been pounding the pavement ever since.

Maybe you're lying here because you don't want to be standing anywhere else.

One person's success doesn't take away from your own.

People need to know you have to walk through that rejection, and it's only going to fuel you. If you can somehow look at it like it's a gift, you're just going to regroup, and work harder, and go deeper. So just embrace it.

I grew up watching PBS and wanting to be a part of it, just like HBO.

Mercury poisoning sounds like a rich man's disease ... like something you might get from the leather seats in your Lamborghini.

Sometimes - this is a tough one - not everyone can handle the truth. Sometimes you have to take a beat. But if you can take that beat, and take the high road, it'll serve you in the long run.

When you try to worry about missteps and all that kind of stuff, that's not the healthiest way to be.

I'm not a video game guy. I would rather throw around a football.

Robert Rodriguez is a genius, and I'm a huge fan of his.

The reality is that I'm an actor from the Midwest and I was 40 movies into it before I started 'Entourage'.

I'm just a stage actor from Chicago.

What's this? You're wearing the shirt of the band you're going to see? Don't be that guy.

For so much of my career I've been trying to find little things and make something out of it.

I feel, as a person, very uninteresting.

I relished the opportunity to be on Broadway ... It's the holy grail for people like me.

I have been drumming my whole life.

HBO does something that most networks don't do which is give a show a chance to find their voice.

I've been on the stage my entire life as an actor.

I want to be radical on the inside, but not on the outside.

John Cusack and I have been friends since childhood, and the fact that we're in so many films together is, no pun intended, serendipitous.

You're trying to figure out a way to go back in time and spend more time with your father. Who wouldn't want to do that?

I'm a stage actor. That is what I do.